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May 9, 2012

The Igorots Ate The Dog Who Ate My Birth Certificate

An interesting article was published on the New York Times delving into a joke that US president Barack Obama made during the White House Correspondents Association dinner held last April.

“What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? A pit bull is delicious.” Obama said. It's a reference to a passage in his published memoir where he talked about eating dog meat during his stay as a child in Indonesia.

The article then goes into the history of dog-eating in America. Here's an interesting paragraph where Igorots take censter stage:

Yet in the United States, dog-eating has been a longstanding flashpoint for anxieties about race and citizenship. In 1904, a group of scantily clad Philippine Igorots from the Luzon highlands reenacted a daily “Bow Wow Feast” at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Loosely based on the custom of sumang, in which a dog was sacrificed and eaten after military victory, the dog-eating spectacle was a sensation. Touring Los Angeles in 1906, the Igorots, now suspiciously “fat and glossy,” were blamed for an “epidemic of thefts” of over 200 “high-class dogs,” according to The Los Angeles Times.

There's a few bits of information there that I didn't know about the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition.

Somebody emailed us asking for the lyrics of the Mankayan hymn. We're not sure what he's asking for because we don't know if the...

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